Nervous Mitt fans: Hit Newt harder

Newt Gingrich’s surge is prompting the first signs of nervousness among top Mitt Romney supporters, some of whom are urging their candidate to take a more aggressive approach to arrest the former House speaker’s sudden rise.

Romney’s backers aren’t panicking — yet. But to many, especially among the GOP donor elite, Gingrich looks like Romney’s most formidable opponent to date, and a rival who requires a much more serious response than the previous conservative alternative, Herman Cain.

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With precious little time left before voting starts — and a big cache of votes now up for grabs thanks to Cain’s withdrawal — Romney supporters say the pressure is building on their candidate to step up and seize the Republican nomination that has drifted just out of his reach all year.

Also cropping up for the first time are told-you-so suggestions that Romney should have engaged in a more forward-leaning campaign during the fall, to lock down the Republican nomination when his opposition was still scattered.

“I have disagreed with his strategy,” said former Senate GOP Leader Trent Lott, an early Romney backer who has helped him raise money. “I think he could’ve closed the deal out before now. He’s run a little too much of a risk-averse campaign. I would have liked for him to have had a higher profile, been more aggressive — so it didn’t wind up as Romney and one other.”

Now that such a binary choice appears increasingly likely, some high-profile Romney contributors think it’s time to get tough with the former House speaker.

“I think he ought to be a little bit more aggressive now and much more aggressive shortly after the first of the year,” said Ted Welch, one of the country’s top Republican donors and Romney’s Tennessee co-chairman.

Asked what other Romney contributors were saying, Welch, a former Republican National Committee finance chairman, responded: “Most feel good about him — and say it’s time to be a little bit more aggressive and then accelerate as needed.”

Even as Romney donors remain confident of their candidate’s chances, they say the former Massachusetts governor will have to deliver a more explicit contrast message against Gingrich, whose long but familiar experience in national politics may make him more difficult to define in negative terms.

“Over the coming weeks, [Romney will] probably have to do that, draw a bit of a brighter line between their experiences and their lifetimes and how that has informed them as candidates,” said Peter Cianchette, a Maine-based Romney donor who was ambassador to Costa Rica under George W. Bush. “I believe he’ll do that in a way that is respectful but yet really says that our job as candidates is to provide that bright line.”

As the race focuses on which candidate has “integrity, stature, selflessness and general leadership abilities,” Cianchette predicted, Romney will be the obvious choice.